Why Can't Kanye West Shut the Hell Up?

Whether he's mouthing off about George W. Bush or Taylor Swift, the rapper is rewarded for acting outrageously — in his public life and in his art. Now it's getting harder to tell the two apart. Especially with the Twitter.

If you're in the mood to listen to Kanye West, and you very well might be, you didn't have to wait for his new album that drops next month to hear his new songs. All fall, every Friday, West has been releasing a new track on his Twitter feed, which is, in almost every possible way, the perfect outlet for his music: equal parts superficial and subversive, occasionally brilliant but mostly fun and forgettable. And the songs we've heard so far are good — witty, catchy, and, in a word, fresh — but they come at a time when Kanye matters less for his music than for the swirl of art and angst he has created around himself on Twitter over the past few years. Forget TMZ and reality TV and the other celebrity death scrums of 2010: Technology has carried Kanye all the way to the other side of fame, where there are no secrets to reveal and there is no reality to show.

As an artist, Kanye is immensely admirable. He doesn't always fare well, but he always fares forward. He's taken rap, a daringly self-centered art form, far beyond the standard ego promotion of bald hype. His last album, 808s & Heartbreak, took the shallow musical gimmickry of Auto-Tune, a program designed to eliminate individuality, and produced a hauntingly personal album. And since the early days of The College Dropout, he's resisted the silly thuggishness and tired rants that had long since failed to shock; while other rappers sell a fantasy of brute power through wealth and violence, Kanye sells the complexity of himself as he is, sometimes grand, sometimes pathetic, sometimes gracious, sometimes vicious, sometimes silly, sometimes profound. And he is nothing if not self-aware: "If I'm a douche, then put me in your coochie," he says in "Lord Lord Lord."

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Gregory Rec/EPA/Corbis

The varied poses of his personality have merged seamlessly and effortlessly with the Twitter age. More than a million fans follow him daily, hourly. They inspect the pictures of the presents Cartier sends him. They read his opinions about Mark Twain. They note what he eats for brunch, what pillows he buys, what tracks he's laying down right this instant. One minute ago he posted the following: "At the crib I use really nice napkins instead of paper towels ... got the idea from the YSL bathroom ... waaaaay nicer." Other celebrities tweet — some with more wit and some (like Lady Gaga) with more followers — but Kanye, despite being mocked for this obsession with Twitter, has fused the technology with his music in a unique way. Take just one set of lyrics from the first Friday track, "Monster": "Have you ever had sex with a pharaoh? / Put the pussy in a sarcophagus / Now she's claiming that I bruise her esophagus." The song is a tweet and the tweet is a song, and the lack of distinction weakens both sides. Same goes for Kanye's public appearances: The world rewards him for speaking outrageously in his songs, and his songs are his life, and his life is his songs, so why shouldn't he speak outrageously in life?

(West and Swift) Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images

All his scandals of the past few years (from calling George W. Bush racist to calling out Taylor Swift for her undeserving win) occurred because he couldn't distinguish between real life and art. (Incidentally, it was lost in the furor that he was right on both counts.) And yet the guy can't help himself. Even when President Obama called him a "jackass," there was a certain tenderness in the word. The president was talking like Kanye was the nation's troubled cousin who can't shut up about himself, which is more or less what he is.

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(Byron) Hulton Archive/Getty; (Booth) Kean Collection/Getty

Since the first celebrities emerged, mixing their work and their lives in powerful dreams of projected personality, the possibility of confusing art and reality has existed. The man considered by some (but not me) to be the world's first celebrity, Lord Byron, was a great poet, but that's not why so many admirers asked for locks of his hair that he reportedly had to start sending out clippings from his dog, Boatswain. Men and women adored Byron because, according to one woman who slept with him, he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." The greatest American actor of the nineteenth century, Edwin Booth, thought his career was over when his brother shot President Lincoln. He soon learned that audiences worshipped him more — and worshipped his tortured performances of "Hamlet" and "Julius Caesar" more — because they knew about his personal tragedy. And the great celebrities of the twentieth century (Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Gwyneth Paltrow) ran away from the cameras, but this only made their fans eager to see more and know more. Today, celebrity has become a perpetual enterprise of more, with Twitter acting as both the engine and the agent of unending revelation. Jump on or jump off.

Kanye has jumped on. Like every hip-hop artist today, Kanye sees himself as a brand and dreams of total integration of himself with everything that can conceivably be consumed. But being a brand involves being both more than a human being and less, which may explain why there's a wild, frantic sadness to his personality, or what Cyril Connolly once described as the "fugitive distress of hedonism." To be a brand is ultimately to be a hollow thing. Like a bell. The hollowness of Kanye West rings out and his distress only makes him more attractive. Being a brand has its own demands, and they are growing more and more pressing by the second. Kanye at least is willing to go all the way. "I'm living in the future so the present is my past. / My presence is a present, kiss my ass," he says in "Monster." All that in just ninety-two characters.

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